


mercy, not sacrifice

by MathildaHilda



Series: What If; Red Dead Redemption Edition [2]
Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games), Red Dead Redemption II
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Character Death, a giant what if, found family and all that jazz
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-23
Updated: 2019-05-23
Packaged: 2020-03-10 03:45:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18930616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MathildaHilda/pseuds/MathildaHilda
Summary: John goes to Valentine and finds an old friend





	mercy, not sacrifice

**Author's Note:**

> Title from;  
> "For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings." - Hosea 6:6

John hasn’t been this far North since before he bought Beecher’s Hope.

There’s been a trip here and there; purchase that bull there and try the whole way down not to lose it to a pack of wolves, purchase that book for Jack from that one shop that apparently didn’t sell anywhere else in either West Elizabeth, New Austin or New Hanover.

He’d never been this far North on other business like the whole Micah affair, where Dutch had walked away and left him and Sadie in the snow with a whole chest of money; a meeting which had, apparently, also brought the whole Goddamn American government on John’s tail.

Yet here he is, studying the remains of an almost desolate town now that the railway has been closed off and repositioned elsewhere.

 

Once, there had been a butcher standing proudly beside the hotel, boasting about precious pelts and fine meats, and the hotel owner himself had at one point, John remembers, told the butcher off for standing there and scaring off his customers with his tales of hunting trips.

Once, there had been two brothers bickering outside the store, both trying to win the affection of a woman who seemed to cherish them both equally; same face or not.

Once, this had been the place for yet another close encounter with Leviticus Cornwall and his all too eager men, followed by the sheriff and the Pinkertons and every other mess they seemed bound to find this far North of land they knew.

Once, this had been a bustling livestock town on the brink of becoming something bigger.

 

Now, however, it was a simple town, barely above a village, with one saloon and a rundown sheriff’s station, and the store selling barely half of what it once had. The train station doesn’t sell tickets anymore, and the postal service is repurposed somewhere else and the stagecoach is gone, replaced by now with an automobile that looks untouched enough to gather cobwebs.

A dog looks up lazily from its position by the door of the building that had once been a hotel, wags its tail twice against the rotting floorboards of the porch and then lowers its head again, no interest in the purpose of John Marston on a skittish stallion.

A bounty poster flaps against the soft breeze, the wanted man long since hanged and forgotten, and John thinks for a moment if that could’ve been him once. He was respected enough in Blackwater by now, but stains are hard to remove, and he’d received his fair share of glares after he’d first settled in the area.

John isn’t sure if it is the way he’s dressed or the vast amount of guns tucked against his saddle or if it’s simply because there are barely any people left living in Valentine, but he doesn’t meet anyone’s eyes when he trots across the leftover rails, simply meeting and greeting and getting little in turn.

He hitches the horse, pats its neck once, and turns to look at the saloon’s lonely door; the batwing doors long since having been repurposed for other matters (that, and the wind sometimes got way too cold, even if it weren’t too far North of Strawberry.)

He meets a plump woman’s eyes, and her eyes flits to his gun. He only needs one; he doesn’t want it, but brings it, nonetheless. She seems to sigh, and turns on her heel and waddles away across the street with a basket not even halfway filled with anything remotely edible.

 

John takes a breath and steps up the stairs leading to the door, and only has to press his palm against it to allow him entry.

There are only a handful of people in the saloon, and only the bartender looks up as he goes. There are two men playing poker by the window, another pressing fingers stiff from drink to worn keys on the piano on the other side of the room. A woman nurses a bottle in the back, head leaned heavily against her hand.

“What will it be, mister?” The bartender asks, but John simply waves his hand and locks his eyes to the very back of the room where there, once upon a time, had been a barber.

John knows it’s him from the way he slumps in the chair, turned to the side to only show off a profile that John had long since thought gone. His slender fingers twirl a spoon between them with such an ease one could hardly believe he would be of the age he is, and upon his head rests a worn and beloved hat.

The brim could use patching, and the band would need to be replaced, but it’s nothing if not loved. (John had seen something like it before; both his own, Arthur’s and even Dutch’s. They’d all been loved and rarely replaced, except for the few occasions that called for different things.)

 

“Thought you were dead.” John says, his voice sounding more strained that usual as he seats himself before him. The old man blinks up at him, blue eyes almost gray, and he smiles softly.

“The same could go to you, John.” Hosea replies, and John chuckles lightly, placing his hat on the table.

“Why didn’t you come find us?” John asks, already knowing the reply, although Hosea seems to muse the question in his mind before placing his spoon next to John’s hat. “You know, I tried. When I could.”

“But you couldn’t find us.”

“No.” He blinks again, brow furrowing as he goes. “Next thing I know, you are all over the papers and every lawman, once again, are after you.”

“But not you.”

“I can accept any kind of betrayal you feel I have made against you, John.”

“I ain’t sayin’ you betrayed us, Hosea.”

“But you were thinkin’ it.” Hosea Matthews had always been, and always would be, a mind reader when it came to John.

“Weak as I was, and hidden in the basement of this fine owner’s brother’s very own saloon in Saint Denis, there was little I could do. And, once I was strong enough, there were little to no traces left to wherever any of you might’ve gone.”

“So, then you know about Arthur.” It’s not a question, but Hosea nods his head, lowered and eyes glaring at his empty bowl. “As much as the next person, at least. The papers, I’ve learned, are not to be trusted.”

John chuckles at that, and so does Hosea even if it leaves him with a familiar cough in his chest. “Then you also don’t know about the boys’ little Caribbean adventure after... you know,” John waves a hand slightly over Hosea’s still hunched form.

He straightens, however, when John says this, and there’s another familiar smile shot his way. “I do not. Though I can expect it to have been quite the mishap.”

“That it was.”

 

They’re quiet for a short while. “Arthur saved me. Got me outta there before it could get any worse, though I can’t see it being able to get any worse than it already did. Dutch and Micah and all those Goddamn Pinkertons.”

Hosea looks at him when he says  _‘Dutch’,_ and John could’ve almost caught the wistfulness in Hosea’s eyes, hadn’t he turned his gaze away before he fully could.

“We created quite a mess, didn’t we?”

“We sure did.”

 

Hosea takes a swig from the bottle, passing it in an asking manner to John, who takes it without really knowing it, and takes a swig himself.

“Where’ve you been all these years, Hosea? I know we all scattered to God knows where, but I ain’t knowing to your story.”

“It’s Hector these days, and I have, for lack of better words, been to all the corners of the world. That is, if the world only consisted of America.” There’s another smile shared, knowing and sad.

“I know why you’re here, John.”

 

John deflates, hunched now almost as much as the older man had been. They’ve seemingly switched positions; the one looking almost eager, and the one who is too reluctant to have much of a choice.

“They got Abigail, Hosea. They got Jack.” Hosea takes off his hat as well and folds the brim in his hands, a seemingly nervous habit gathered over years of running. His hair is, somehow, even whiter than it had been when John had lost him the first time.

 

“They have taken a lot, John. They will keep taking. They’re America, through and through, no matter how much of Dutch’s rantings about the very embodiment of this country I never fully agreed on. It’s better this way, John. I’ve lived a long life, longer than I should’ve and longer than most.”

Neither needs to say it, but they all know who Hosea refers to. Not simply one person, but every one of those lost over the years they spent on the other side of the lawmen’s guns.

“It ain’t fair.”

“Nothing’s fair, my boy. That’s why we are who we are. But at some point we have to own up to the mistakes we have made in the messes we’ve created ourselves.”

 

John closes his eyes and pulls the gun from the holster, hides it under his hat, perched as it is in the middle of the table. Doesn’t cock it, doesn’t aim. Doesn’t do anything but look at Hosea’s gleaming eyes.

They’re grayer now, but they’re still blue enough for the wisdom to be more prominent there than in anyone else’s eyes that John has met during the years.

The gray only seems to accentuate the fact that this is a man who has seen his fair share of shit.

 

There’s a scuffling of chairs and suddenly it’s silent in the saloon. The pianist walks out the door, the poker playing men are threatening each other over the other’s winnings just outside the door and the woman has collapsed on the table in soft snores with the empty bottle still in her hand. The bartender looks at them and seems to contemplate things before he too up and leaves.

“You planned this, didn’t you?” John asks and turns to the soft gray eyes. Hosea doesn’t need to speak. They both know anyway.

“Here.” Hosea scoots a satchel with his foot across the floor and leaves it by John’s chair. “It needs to look proper, John.”

“It don’t. They’ll just write whatever they damn well want. Same as they did with Bill and Javier.” ‘ _Same as they’ll do to you, and Dutch.’_ He thinks, but doesn’t say.

“Same as they did with Arthur, I’d expect.” It stings, it does, but John doesn’t flinch.

 

Arthur’s been dead a long time, and John wonders, absentmindedly, if Hosea’s been too. Not in the way that puts you in the ground, but in the way that drapes a wall of cotton across your mind and suddenly something’s happened and something’s changed and then very little makes any kind of sense apart from one, single thing, be it what it may.

Death, out of many things, sometimes makes perfect sense.

Hosea stands up, puts the hat on his head in a smooth motion and suddenly looks so very, very young.

John follows him, and feels so very much like the kid that was about to be hanged.

“Thank you, Hosea.” John says, the words hanging in the air like a noose. The words have gone unspoken for the longest of times and then suddenly they’re exposed; naked and raw when their very mention had, at some point, seemed almost unspeakable.

Hosea looks bemused and meets his eyes. “Thank  _you,_ John.”

There’s no ever after; John knows this. There’s no heaven, because Hell is all they’ve ever been promised, but at least a man can hope that the man he buries on a mountaintop that very same night, after Ross has taken a good look at him, ends up somewhere where old scars don’t hurt and where the whiskey is just perfect.

The satchel contains a well-kept gun with a handful of bullets still in the box, and a leather-bound journal with a cracked spine, so much like the one Arthur’d kept and later John had stowed away at Beecher’s once he’d set off after Bill. The coin purse, most likely stolen on a train or at a fare, contains a meager sum of ten dollars; enough for a meal for John and his horse.

 

Enough, to be the final gift from an old and tired friend.

**Author's Note:**

> The name Hector is in reference to the prince and fighter in the Iiliad who participated in the Troyan War, but it doesn't really have any kind of relevance to the story other than that I see Hosea as being a massive geek when it comes to history and mythology (especially roman and greek in that regard)
> 
> You can find me on [Tumblr](http://mathildahilda.tumblr.com) here!


End file.
